The Science of Discworld II

tribesman, is to find out what is in store for you, what is Written in the Book.
    Maybe you don’t really want to know what’s in the Book, but monkey curiosity overcomes fear, and in any case you can’t change what’s Written and it might just be nice. So you go to the old lady in the forest who can read tealeaves, or (today) to the iridologist or the spiritualist medium. And all of these alleged ways to foresee the future have a very revealing common feature. They interpret the small-and-contingent into the large-and-important.
    Just like the Roman general spilling the guts of a ram on to the ground before the battle, so that the small-and-complicated can mirror a forthcoming battle that will be large-and-complicated, tealeaves and hand-lines are small-and-complicated, and ‘must’ therefore encode your complicated future. The kind of magic that is being invoked here is an unexpressed homology, which on some level we all believe in because we use it all the time. The stories that we construct in our minds are small-and-complicated, and they really do mirror the large-and-complicated things that happen to us. The Concise Lexicon of the Occult lists 93 methods of divination, from aeromancy (divination by the shapes of clouds) to xylomancy (divination by the shapes of twigs). All but four of them employ the small-and-complicated to predict the large-and-complicated; their materials include salt, barley, wind, wax, lead, onion sprouts (that one’s called ‘cromniomancy’), laughter, blood, fish guts, flames, pearls, and the noises made by mice (‘myomancy’). The other four involve invoking spirits, calling up demons, or talking to gods.
    To many tribal innocents, other people sometimes seem to have access to different little stories that they can make relevant to your life, like ‘Your fate is written on your hand’ or ‘The dead communicate with me and they know all’. So people of that inclination can convince you, with a bit of flummery, that they know your future, and they can produce convincing large stories which you interpret as your fate.
    There is a deep paradox in our attitude to personal free will. We want to know what the future will be in order to make a free choice that protects us against it. So we think of the future of everythingoutside us as being deterministic, which is why the gypsy or the medium or the dead can know what it is going to be. Nevertheless, we think of our own future as involving free choices. Our free will lets us choose to consult the gypsy, who then convinces us that we have no choice: for example, that the life-line on our palm determines when we will die. So our actions betray a deep-seated belief that the laws of the universe apply to everything except us.
    The biggest wholesale business that preys on our convictions and confusions about free will in a powerful and often cruel universe, is astrology. Astrologers claim authority from Ancient Egypt, from Paracelsus and Dee, from Ancient Wisdom of all kinds including the Hindu Vedas and other Eastern literature. Let us review the appeal of astrology in the light of narrativium.
    Astrologers have an immense following, and they have managed to pick up on both tribal and barbarian stories. They have the counter-scientific story for the civilised culture, able to attract both the tribal and barbarian aspects of our foolishness. They really do believe that the future, for each of us, is influenced by our time of birth. 2 They time it to the second.
    What seems to be important to them is against which starry background (the Zodiac) we view the planets in our own solar system. As we move from intra-uterine life to the hands of the midwife, doctor, partner, our lives are determined from then on by astral forces. This strange belief is supported by so many people, who turn to the ‘Your Stars’ pages first in their daily newspaper, that we should seek some explanation within our ‘story’ framework. What is the story of our futures that is implicit in the control of our lives by the positions of the stars? As opposed, say, to the medical staff who, at the time of ourbirth, probably had more gravitational influence upon us 3 than the planet Jupiter was having?
    Well, the stars are obviously very numinous, powerful. They’re up there wheeling over us. At least, they were when we were shepherds, staying out all night, but most civilised folk now don’t know why